Now that PHP 5.6 was finally released, PHP 5.7 is already being planned as a release to happen before PHP 7.

The new features planned for PHP 5.7 was one of the main topics covered by Manuel Lemos and Arturs Sosins in the episode 51 of the Lately in PHP podcast. They also did an extensive review the new features of PHP 5.6.

Now listen to the podcast, or watch the hangout video, or read the transcript to learn more about these PHP release features.

The Innovation Award is an initiative that aims to distinguish developers that publish innovative packages since 2004.

Starting this month, Manuel Lemos and Arturs Sosins are recording a dedicated video hangout and audio podcast to comment about the outstanding features of all the past month nominees and winners PHP and JavaScript packages, the prizes that the authors earned, starting with the nominees from the month of June 2014.

Listen to the podcast, or watch the hangout video, or read the transcript to learn why the nominated packages were considered to be innovative.

It seems the popularity of PHP continues to upset people that do not sympathize with the language for some reason. The release of yet another article claiming the PHP decline was one of the main topics discussed by Manuel Lemos and Arturs Sosins in the episode 50 of the Lately in PHP podcast.

They also discussed the latest decisions about the features being planned for PHP 7, the last release of PHP 5.3 and PHP 5.4 going into security releases mode, and the (Facebook) PHP language specification effort.

Now listen to the podcast, or watch the hangout video or read the transcript to learn more about the details of these interesting PHP discussions.

With the plans to bring the PHPNG performance improvements, the future PHP 7 is bright. That was one of the main topics discussed by Manuel Lemos and CÚsar Rodas in the episode 49 of the Lately in PHP podcast.

They also talked about the discussions of Node.js developers moving on to the Go language and the parallel of PHP developers moving to the Facebook Hack language, the proposals to drop PEAR for Pickle as PHP extension installer and several other PHP proposals, and the latest and future improvements of the PHP Classes site user interface features.

Now listen to this podcast, or watch the hangout video, or read the transcript text to learn more about what was said during these interesting PHP discussions.

So it is settled, after a lot of discussion, the voting process to choose the name for the next major PHP version just ended. The winning proposal is to call PHP 7 the next major version after PHP 5.x.

Read this article to understand the proposals and what to expect for the future of PHP 7 in terms of features and possible release date.

Lately the debate about whether you should use TDD or not in all software projects all the time has been very intense. That was one of the main topics discussed by Manuel Lemos and Arturs Sosins in the episode 48 of the Lately in PHP podcast.

They also talked about the upcoming end of life release of PHP 5.3, getting information of parameter type hinting with reflection, using object methods on native data types, security problems of OAuth implementations, and the built-in support of Composer to access password protected repositories.

Listen to the podcast now, or watch the hangout video, or read the transcript text to know more about these interesting PHP discussions.

The PHP Classes site is launching a new design for the package pages. The Design Thinking process was applied to determine exactly what needed to be added or improved to make it perfectly address the users needs.

Read this article or watch the demonstration video to learn how the Design Thinking process was used to create this new design and upcoming features that will address other users needs that no other site is satisfying.

PHP Composer was just updated to add built-in support to automatically login to private or public repositories that require a password to be accessed.

Read this article to learn how it works and how you can use this feature to automate the installation of packages from PHP Classes and other Composer repositories that may require password based authentication.